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Dr Judy Bolger supports student success at Carlow College, St Patrick’s, working in the Academic Resource Office as Writing Development Tutor and lecturing on Academic & Digital Skills and Irish History modules. She is also an Educational Technologist, bringing expertise in digital learning tools and pedagogies to enhance teaching and learning across the College. She completed her PhD in History at Trinity College Dublin (2025), funded by the Trinity College Dublin 1252 Postgraduate Research Scholarship, focusing on motherhood and institutional life in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland. Her M.Phil. and B.A. research explored nineteenth-century Irish social history, including breastfeeding and reproductive insanity.
Judy is interested in nineteenth-century social and cultural Irish history; in particular, the experience of women, motherhood and infancy. Current interest in institutionalised women is centred upon twentieth-century establishments such as the Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes, but Judy’s research argues that some of these themes and concerns are predated to the nineteenth century. Therefore, her doctoral research explores and highlights nineteenth-century attitudes towards motherhood to widen the historiography on Irish women.
Professional Associations:
Book Review Editor, Women’s History Association of Ireland
Member of Irish Association of Professional Historians
Network member, ‘Institutions and Infant Care: Foundling Hospitals and Residential Homes for Babies in twentieth-century Europe’, AHRC-funded research network,  www.institutionsandinfantcare.org
Network member, COST Action CA22159, ‘National, International and Transnational Histories of Healthcare, 1850-2000 (EuroHealthHist)’, https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA22159/
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Publications:
2021: ‘Reconstructing a narrative of impoverished motherhood through the lens of Irish institutional records’, Salvador Ryan, ed., Birth and the Irish: a Miscellany (Dublin, 2021).
2020: ‘Book review: Women, Crime and Punishment in Ireland, by Elaine Farrell’, Women’s History Association of Ireland.
2020: ‘Book review: Richmond Barracks: We were there, 77 women of the Easter Rising, by Mary McAuliffe and Liz Gillis’, Irish Studies Review, 28.4 (2020), 524-527.
2019: “A Hopeless Case’: the representation of mothers and the workhouse in Irish newspapers, 1870-1910’,  History Studies, volume 20, 24-39.
2017: “The Deasy Business: an assessment of the final phase of the Irish Civil War’, History Studies, volume 18, 16-28.
2017: ‘The influential role of the Catholic Clergy during the Revolutionary period in Carlow’, Carloviana, volume 65, 137-143.
Blogs:
‘‘A Hopeless Case’: Constructs of Early Twentieth-century Irish Impoverished Motherhood’, Carlow College, St. Patrick’s
2018: Perceptions of Pregnancy
“so a word to the wise’: reassessing the role of the upper-class Irish father in nineteenth-century childrearing’
Qualifications:
B.A. Hons English and History, Carlow College, 2016
M.Phil. Modern Irish History, Trinity College, Dublin, 2017
Ph.D. History, Trinity College, Dublin, 2025
